I agree. Having choice in this respect is wonderful and
important. Abraham's work in this regard was great,
though, as I am a staunch user of what is free and
open-source (in large part because I want anyone
to be able to modify and re-compile my scores), I am a bit
saddened that he moved to proprietary fonts. You will
notice that I use his (still OFL, though old) Profondo
brace font (a conversion of Bravura; I replaced his
Profondo music font because it was out of date, being
based on an early pre-release of Bravura).
Adding SMuFL support will enhance our ability to add new
fonts by a lot. Right now a big issue is that it is
extremely difficult to create the proper special tables
(LILY and so on) in fonts so that LilyPond can actually
use them. And most fonts are not METAFONT-designed like
Emmentaler, so the accessible infrastructure for font
building for LilyPond is abysmal. So to me the advantage
of SMuFL is not only that we'll be able to use fonts from
elsewhere, but the creation of fonts becomes orders of
magnitude less difficult too (as the tools for developing
SMuFL fonts are in place).
Of course, between Abraham Lee's conversion of the
pre-release Bravura, and the existing Bravura support that
had been put together before, this is not the first time
that Bravura was made to be used in LilyPond. But I think
it's finally ready for actual publication-quality usage
now! So while Owen does his work on SMuFL support, we have
another good choice for the present!
On 6/25/20 5:16 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
Am Donnerstag, den 25.06.2020, 04:37 -0400 schrieb Daniel Benjamin
Miller:
You're right, it does essentially replicate Dorico's style.
I don't think LilyPond should change what its default style is;
I think what you suggested with this wasn't to change the defaults. But
I really like the idea of having choice. It is good that out-of-the-box
scores are immediately recognizble (although I have the impression that
the *text* font is even more notable in this respect).
But people shouldn't be limited to that "personality" but have the
option to tweak the output to what they like. Generally speaking scores
shouldn't necessarily have the personality of the program but that of
the author/editor/publisher. Abraham Lee's efforts in making
alternative fonts properly available at all, and his collection of
fonts, was a huge step forware IMHO, and I really hope that Owen Lamb's
work of making LilyPond SMuFL-compliant will make that possibility of
choice even more fundmental.
Urs
I don't
like the Emmentaler font myself (Simon Tatham put it best, though I
actually feel the same about Gonville:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/gonville/ - "I designed
it
because Lilypond's standard font (Feta) was not to my taste: I found
it
to be (variously) over-ornate, strangely proportioned, and subtly
not
like the music I was used to reading. Music set in Feta looks to me
like
strangely stylised music; music set in Gonville just looks to me
like
music, so I can read it without being distracted so much.)
But I also think that we should not try to change the defaults. But
I
also think that almost nobody actually cares much about music
typography, really: only LilyPond and Dorico have really put effort
into
creating their default fonts and appearances; MuseScore borrows its
fonts from both, and Finale and Sibelius' fonts are really clearly
not
that seriously taken.
LilyPond is not static, but it should not really change in terms of
its
defaults either. Much like TeX, we should not change the default
fonts,
in my opinion (though of course Emmentaler and Feta are being
expanded
as new features are added to LilyPond, and slight tweaks and
improvements are all well and good).
On 6/25/20 3:06 AM, Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
On Thu, 25 Jun 2020, Daniel Benjamin Miller wrote:
I'd like to share something:
https://github.com/dbenjaminmiller/bmusicfonts
I personally prefer the Bravura design to Emmentaler/Feta, and
there'd been
Thanks for this, I am going to try it for sure. I like Dorico's
output, and this will sort of give a similar result for LilyPond if
I
understand correctly?
Which leads to a more philosophic question. Do we want LilyPond
scores
to have an immediately recognizable "personality" or are we slowly
moving to a situation where everyone, including LilyPond, is trying
to
look the same (when using default settings), and it will be hard
to
see if a score was typeset in LilyPond, MuseScore, Dorico, Finale,
or
Sibelius?
I hope LilyPond will always try to keep a distinct personality in
the
default output, which is not a static thing but can be discussed
in
the Lilypond user and developers community, changed, and improved
continuously. But let not all our efforts go to looking as much as
possible like "the other ones".
I know LilyPond is (almost) flexible and tweakable enough to have
it
all, but what I am talking about is the default output.